Rereadings

After nature

"One of the most important novels of the 20th century," claims Francine Du Plessix Gray on the weather-beaten green jacket of my Virago Modern Classic edition of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing. I love that. I was 18 when I first read it. I wrote my name inside in my best ink pen and I was thrilled by that simple acknowledgement: that a novel by a woman about a woman's spiritual journey could be important.

Surfacing tells the story of a young Canadian divorcée returning to her childhood wilderness home with her boyfriend and two friends to investigate the disappearance of her father. Increasingly convinced that he has drowned in one of the huge lakes of northern Quebec, she dives deep in her search for him. The diving, the water, are so spookily described that more than 20 years later I can still get goose-pimples just thinking of it, and of the electrifying moment when she comes face to face, under water, with a spectre from her own past:

"I couldn't let it out, it was dead already, it had drowned in air. It was there when I woke up, suspended in the air above me like a chalice, an evil grail and I thought, Whatever it is, part of myself or a separate creature, I killed it. It wasn't a child but it could have been one, I didn't allow it."

Recovering the truth about her abortion and relationship with a married man is the catalyst for the most extraordinary metamorphosis in fiction since Kafka's Gregor Samsa woke up as a giant insect. The island exerts its elemental pull on Atwood's nameless heroine, shredding the layers of her personality as she descends into madness - or mysticism. In this state, all the trappings of civilisation (and especially femininity) are to be loathed and rejected. Even a hairbrush becomes dangerous. "I know that the brush is forbidden, I must stop being in the mirror."

From the age of six months Atwood was familiar with the Canadian bush, accompanying her family and zoologist father on research trips, living in a log cabin "on a granite point a mile by water from a Quebec village so remote that the road went in only two years before I was born". Two years before Surfacing was published, she wrote the poetry collection The Journals of Susanna Moodie, reflecting on the life of the 19th-century Canadian pioneer with whom she felt an obvious affinity.

She has returned to the theme many times, in short fiction such as her story collection Wilderness Tips and in her most recent novel Oryx and Crake, shortlisted for this year's Man Booker prize, set in a future where the world has returned to a savage "wilderness" of a most unexpected and unnatural kind.

The wild, filthy, half-animal, demented character who narrates the last few chapters of Surfacing is a remarkable creation, someone whom the gods have summoned, a visionary who speaks to us directly from nature: "It does not approve of me or disapprove of me, it tells me it has nothing to tell me, only the fact of itself."

When it was published in 1972 the book provoked debate among feminists about whether Atwood's pantheistic symbolism and identification of a woman's body with the forces of nature reinforced a stereotype of women as earthy and instinctive. This now seems a rather dim reading of a hugely intelligent writer. Atwood raises questions about the relationship of nature and culture only to show how false such polarities are. Even the fleeting religious vision she offers us is in the end snatched back: "No gods to help me now, they're questionable once more, theoretical as Jesus."

Thirty years on, I wonder why so few books are written about women's religious quests. It's not as if we don't have a tradition of visionaries, nuns, saints and heretics. At 18, I was struggling to throw off my Christian upbringing, with the strongest suspicion that I was a budding atheist. Like most teenagers I was exhilarated by the big questions: Why are we here? Who are we? Why can't we get along?... How delighted I was that someone like Atwood existed, prodding at these matters with her giant pencil, pinning them to the page in words I could understand, words grounded in mud and life but full of light.

"This above all, to refuse to be a victim," says her heroine in the final pages - the most famous line in the book. I used to trill it to myself. It was a clarion call to young feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. These days, teaching creative writing to women who write frequently and ghoulishly about their triumphant survival of rape, incest and other kinds of abuse, I suspect we may have taken the point too far. The worst criticism these writers can fling at a female character in fiction is that she is passive. In Surfacing, Atwood elaborates on her statement about victimhood: "I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone."

Rereading the novel now, at 41, Surfacing struck me as being less about feminism and more about what it means to be human. Who or what would we be, stripped down to our bare selves, deprived of all we have learned, even language? "The animals have no need of speech, why talk when you are a word?"